Fouad Mami
University of Adrar, English, Faculty Member
- African Literature, African History and cultures, Deleuzian Art Theory, History of Political Thought, Arabic Historiography (History), African History, and 20 moreMigrant and Diasporic Literatures, Postcolonial Literature, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Islamic Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, History, Cultural Studies, Art History, Gender Studies, Literature, Research Methodology, Gender, Elizabeth Grosz, Postcolonial Theory, African Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, African Studies, and African American Literatureedit
- Fouad Mami is a Professor of English at the University of Adrar (Algeria). As of September 2021, he is serving in the... moreFouad Mami is a Professor of English at the University of Adrar (Algeria). As of September 2021, he is serving in the capacity of Associate Editor for Africa Review, a top-ranking academic journal published by Brill and is an interdisciplinary academic journal of the African Studies Association of India (ASA India) https://brill.com/view/journals/bafr/bafr-overview.xml?contents=editorialContent-48382. Apart from contemporary African Literature, he is interested in postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, Deleuzian criticism and the history of thought largely conceived. His research has appeared in Amerikastudien/American Studies, The Journal of North African Studies, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos and other outlets.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1627347305/ref=nosim/dissertationcomd?creativeASIN=1627347305&linkCode=w61&imprToken=Zzs8LHGQlLZ087YiVI.ddA&slotNum=0
http://www.brownwalker.com/search/?search-input=Fouad+Mamiedit
supposes that in many cases plagiarism results from poor training and a confused perception of what is involved in research. The textbook is addressed to non-native English-speaking students and their instructors , principally those... more
supposes that in many cases plagiarism results from poor training and a confused perception of what is involved in research. The textbook is addressed to non-native English-speaking students and their instructors , principally those seeking degrees in literature. Through a close examination of what initially seems to be the self-evident 'facts' of research-those "self-evident" steps in the multilayered research process that are usually glossed over in research methodolgy courses-students will become less confused about what the research practically involves and more empowered to work on their first serious research project with confidence and clarity. Fouad Mami is a scholar at the Department of English, University of Ahmed Draia Adrar (Algeria). He graduated with a doctorate from the University of Algiers in 2010. His research has been featured in Amerikastudien/American Studies; The Journal of North African Studies; Clio: A Journal of Literature, History , and the Philosophy of History and other no less intense outlets. Methodology for Master Students of Literature: Overcoming the Lure to Plagiarize with Strategies to Avoid aims at galvanizing Master' s students to undertake their dissertations and other research assignments with tenacity and grace. This textbook offers a diagnosis of the disease of illicit borrowings undermining the Master's students' research. I can only congratulate Fouad Mami for this textbook, which I am sure will help students and teachers alike to question their pedagogical practice. Boutheldja Riche, University of Mouloud Mammeri Tizi-Ouzou, (Algeria) At once a precious source of information and a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the criterion of originality, Mami's textbook treats plagiarism and the strategies to avoid this plight before it even occurs.
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The present volume, Introduction to Contemporary African Literature, relates to the need to shift critical attention and reconsider the canon we call African Literature. The classical themes of African literature were narratives of... more
The present volume, Introduction to Contemporary African Literature, relates to the need to shift critical attention and reconsider the canon we call African Literature. The classical themes of African literature were narratives of authentic cultures and the fight against colonial occupations, together with early encounters with nascent nationalism. More recent concerns, however, display the consequences from state-failures, endemic corruption, dictatorships and illegal migration scenarios. Considered as an effort to highlight these questions in recent African literature, the book features and examines the literary outputs of four African Anglophone writers: two from the Maghreb (Laila Lalami from Morocco and Belkacem Meghzouchene from Algeria) and two from West Africa (both from Nigeria, Sefi Atta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). The four, Dr. Mami claims, are burgeoning new voices, telling a transnational narrative and exploring globalizing forces, both at the level of themes and techniques. In short, the author reads the contributions of these prolific writers as social commentary regarding the way present ugly realities are logical consequences of the misuse of power following political independence, not only the legacy of colonial occupation and trans-Atlantic slavery. In addition, the book interjects its commentaries with several essay- and paragraph-related questions, theoretical contextualization, useful tips on essay writing and other required guidance for passing exams and writing exceptional term papers. In following the recommendations inside, Master students of literature will be less lost and even become savvy in respect to the expectations that their transition from Licence to the Masters level entails.
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This article provides a detailed assessment of Laila Lalami's novel The Moor's Account (2014), in which a slave decides to escape upon becoming certain that his enslaver will never act on a prior understanding to free him. Still, his... more
This article provides a detailed assessment of Laila Lalami's novel The Moor's Account (2014), in which a slave decides to escape upon becoming certain that his enslaver will never act on a prior understanding to free him. Still, his desertion carries with it the ultimate price: never seeing his home or country again. The article explores what that imaginative escape into the wilderness signifies in respect to statehood, both as an idea and as a practice. The evolving events of the novel suggest that polities create domestication not by accident, but by default. For, in Lalami's novel, the state sells chimerical illusions to the aspiring bourgeoisie in the form of abstract debts, whose repayment fattens state coffers and enslaves the aspiring bourgeoisie. Such a stance vis-à-vis the state and its logic raises a concern with Lalami's readership since the postcolonial arrangement rarely diverges, if at all, from this immanent logic, the one that hinges on the state's tendential predilection for enslavement. Lalami's readers are therefore invited to reconsider their bias against statelessness if circumventing slavery is indeed possible. The article sceptically considers whether, by pursuing such a radical approach, Lalami could be romanticizing statelessness as an easy means of circumventing postcoloniality. This essay will be engaging not only to literary scholars, but also to political economists, development planners, city designers and environmentalists.
Research Interests: Radical Geography, Postcolonial Studies, Communism (Revolutions), Resistance (Social), Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, and 12 morePostcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Maghrebi Literature, Maghreb studies, Empire, Cultural power and resistance, Protest and resistance, Radical Democarcy, Communism and national question, Littérature Maghrébine, Histoire Sociale Du Maghreb Médiéval, and Postcolonialism
Borrowing the concepts of “pornotroping” and “vestibular” from African American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalizing demotions and... more
Borrowing the concepts of “pornotroping” and “vestibular” from African
American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami
has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalizing
demotions and misogynistic practices. In registering their objectification as “flesh-only,” that is through mapping the vestibular, these female characters have converged orientalism and misogyny and charted their own liberating subjectivity. The liberation specifies how orthodox Muslim jurisprudence is predicated on violence against femininity. Still, “Pornotroping” cannot function without its dialectical opposite, the vestibular. The latter elicits the amount of demystification carried on by North African gender activists in the manner of mudawana.
American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami
has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalizing
demotions and misogynistic practices. In registering their objectification as “flesh-only,” that is through mapping the vestibular, these female characters have converged orientalism and misogyny and charted their own liberating subjectivity. The liberation specifies how orthodox Muslim jurisprudence is predicated on violence against femininity. Still, “Pornotroping” cannot function without its dialectical opposite, the vestibular. The latter elicits the amount of demystification carried on by North African gender activists in the manner of mudawana.
Research Interests: Moroccan Studies, African American Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Studies (Literature), Postcolonial Literature of Africa, and 12 morePostcolonial theory (Cultural Theory), Moroccan Literature, Arab American Literature, African-American Political Thought, Neocolonialism, Moroccan Women: Politics, Litterature and Culture, North African literature, Moroccan culture, Moroccan Cultural Studies, La Littérature Féminine Maghrébine, Criticla Race Theory, and Neocolonialisme
Capturing the concepts of 'pornotroping' and 'vestibular' from African-American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalising demotions and... more
Capturing the concepts of 'pornotroping' and 'vestibular' from African-American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalising demotions and misogynistic practices. In processing their objectification as 'flesh-only,' that is through mapping the vestibular, these female characters have converged both orientalism and misogyny and charted their own liberating subjectivity. The liberation specifies how orthodox Muslim jurisprudence is predicated on violence against femininity. 'Pornotroping' generates its dialectical opposite, the vestibular. The latter elicits the amount of demystification carried on by North Africans in the manner of mudawana.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, North Africa Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Anthropology and Sexuality, Mediterranean Studies, and 13 moreGender, State Formation and Sovereignty in Middle East, Maghrebi Literature, Maghreb studies, Racial and ethnic discrimination, Islamic Jurisprudence, Gender Discrimination, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Middle East and North Africa, Gender and religion, APELA (Association pour l'étude des littératures africaines), Littérature Maghrébine, and Islamic law and jurisprudence
Drawing on an unorthodox approach to desire, Belkacem Meghzouchene’s second novel, The overcoat of Virginia (2013), finds that opposition activists are probably more frustrating than the regime they contest. Specifying ‘a lack-based’... more
Drawing on an unorthodox approach to desire, Belkacem Meghzouchene’s second novel, The overcoat of Virginia (2013), finds that opposition activists are probably more frustrating than the regime they contest. Specifying ‘a lack-based’ desire, the trope of sodomy in the novel articulates the ways in which the Algerian postcolonial ruling elites allegedly embezzle the country’s resources without any sensible logic except ‘pure grab’, a predatory habit. This article argues that, while building on desire for understanding a postcolony such as Algeria can be insightful, reducing it to sexual assault is indicative of an impoverished intellectuality marked by a paucity of abstraction. Expressions of desire, once inhibited through disciplining the body via a recourse to an alienating temporality such as Islamism (even when not explicit), cannot be counted as insurrectional. Measured against the task of ‘revamping history’, the one outlined by the opposition activists in the novel, the ‘perverted-desire-as-sodomy argument’ leads to a submissive regime of truth. Still, Meghzouchene’s characters’ conservative outlook encourages readers not to overlook the biopolitical dimension of the postcolonial state, but warns against populist discourse that confuses scandalizing with activism.
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With the French colonisation of Algeria in 1830, women’s dance in the Ouled Naïl region came to be confused with what in the West is called ‘belly dancing’. Postcolonial nationalism continues to build on the fetishisation of the art form... more
With the French colonisation of Algeria in 1830, women’s dance in the Ouled Naïl region came to be confused with what in the West is called ‘belly dancing’. Postcolonial nationalism continues to build on the fetishisation of the art form and condemns it as a perpetuation of the master–slave narrative. During the colonial period, the dance came to involve economically disenfranchised young women from Ouled Naïl in merry-making performances in regions outside their own, and for a fee. However, this article explains how this dance is equally grounded in a pastoral-nomadic order, as it parallels the Ouled Naïl seasonal migration to the b’ni m’zab oasis in the south during autumn and back to their homelands during the spring. The dance is known as fezāai, connoting the shivering pigeon freely flying back and forth. In order for La mission civilisatrice to succeed, that pastoral-nomadic order had to be systematically destroyed. This article suggests that the example of Naïliyat dance offers postcolonial policy-makers insights into how to decolonise development and provide a space for working outside the capitalist economy.
Keywords: Algeria, dance, Naïliyat dance, postcolonial development, body thinking, fetishisation.
Keywords: Algeria, dance, Naïliyat dance, postcolonial development, body thinking, fetishisation.
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The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a... more
The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a crippling standstill awaits a given cause. The Palestinian question as recently imagined by the American Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin (2010) stands a glaring example for such a predicament. The predicament is characterized by a predilection towards ontology instead of epistemology, the personal rather than the collective, character over theme, irony and excess instead of explicit and balanced approaches and finally, discussions favoring culture and identity in lieu of class and resistance. Masking that same postcolonial predicament is the narrative obsession with the existential-ontological, turning the struggle into a textual one. All in all, the predicament expands on postcolonial experiences by raising awareness to the dialectics of emancipation discourses. Introduction:
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Research on illegal immigration rarely checks the postmodernist propulsions that hinge on postcolonial subjects and their choices. In the following essay on Laila Lalami’s last piece, titled: ‘The Storyteller’ in Hope and Other Dangerous... more
Research on illegal immigration rarely checks the postmodernist propulsions that hinge on postcolonial subjects and their choices. In the following essay on Laila Lalami’s last piece, titled: ‘The Storyteller’ in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), an argument is specified through the Moroccan-American author carefully tracing Murad’s rise from the dregs of angst. This rise reflects the lives of disenchanted Maghrebi youths seeking illegal immigration or harr’ga as part of impinging postmodernism on postcolonial experience. Embracing the future in Murad’s circumstances could be possible via affective, not cognitive, means, by investing in cultural memory. Following his deportation from Spain, Murad, the failed harr’ag, becomes emotionally damaged, a force of destruction propelling his own annihilation. Only when abiding by the story he learned from his deceased father does he notice his chances of reconciling with suffering. Through the medieval story of Ghomari, the rug weaver, whose art brought down a despot, Murad shakes off the two American tourists’ emotional oversight of what it means to be postcolonial. Eventually, Murad decides to become a writer: an artist and dreamer. By combining phenomenological, existential, and mythical insights, the essay highlights how Lalami’s story leads readers to discover an empowering narrative for the Maghrebi youth; affective empowerment rooted in shouldering responsibility and emulating the mythic hero.
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Critics such as Yogita Goyal and Akin Adesokan pertinently remark that there exists a wining (market-friendly) template in the imaginative output from contemporary African writers regarding modern slavery. The template only reinforces the... more
Critics such as Yogita Goyal and Akin Adesokan pertinently remark that there exists a wining (market-friendly) template in the imaginative output from contemporary African writers regarding modern slavery. The template only reinforces the image of the ‘begging bowl’ in respect to the African’s image in the west, which confirms the age-old prejudices, but it also complicates the relationship inside American society by inventing a false unanimity around certain political and ideological choices that would not otherwise pass. The present essay argues that, while they actively seek to engage readers with the theme of modern slavery, neither Sefi Atta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes to fit into such a preexisting template. They work on the plot and deploy a set of allusions and other techniques to recreate an experience of slavery free from the exigencies of the US literary market. Pathos, as well as both ethos and logos, is carefully calibrated to allow for a succinct and informed reading experience. The two writers unabashedly question the socio-political reality of post-colonial Africa without capitalizing on the exotic dimension. As such, Atta and Adichie instantiate Wale Adebanwi’s definition of imaginative writers as social thinkers.
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For Ali Eteraz, contemporary Muslim subjectivity is imprisoned inside centuries of indoctrination that make Muslims ill-prepared to face the challenges put forward by 9/11. Similarly, mainstream American identity feeds on supremacism that... more
For Ali Eteraz, contemporary Muslim subjectivity is imprisoned inside centuries of indoctrination that make Muslims ill-prepared to face the challenges put forward by 9/11. Similarly, mainstream American identity feeds on supremacism that escalates cultural tension instead of easing it; triumphalism and expansionism antagonize not a small number of people around the globe. The narrative of Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer (2016) broaches the need for a nonoppositional ontology inclusive of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Eteraz’s proposal works toward defusing the antagonism that mires the contemporary world in stagnation and violence. The protagonist in Native Believer remains unable to reconcile his Muslim background with his Americanness until he embraces the androgynous third identity that mediates between the former two only to bypass them both. He seeks to recapture the heterogeneity of the early American republic as set by its founding fathers; this is how he eventually joins a Department of State
team that reaches vulnerable Muslims worldwide. Instead of furthering the expansionist goals of the U. S. empire or blowing up himself and others, Eteraz’s protagonist is keen on aiding fellow Muslims to become active participants on the world stage. Eteraz’s protagonist instantiates tolerance as a midway course that deflates the tension between the supremacists on both sides.
team that reaches vulnerable Muslims worldwide. Instead of furthering the expansionist goals of the U. S. empire or blowing up himself and others, Eteraz’s protagonist is keen on aiding fellow Muslims to become active participants on the world stage. Eteraz’s protagonist instantiates tolerance as a midway course that deflates the tension between the supremacists on both sides.
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Common sensical discussion of illegal immigration in and on the Maghreb points the finger in the direction of authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean. The EU is reproached for closing its borders and the North African governments... more
Common sensical discussion of illegal immigration in and on the Maghreb points the finger in the direction of authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean. The EU is reproached for closing its borders and the North African governments for exploiting the problem by defusing attention elsewhere and downplaying its gravity. The Moroccan writer Laila Lalami through her collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) prefers to focus more on the harraga populations themselves, since its is their unthinking proclivities that exacerbate the problem and allow the ruling machinery to become biopolitical entities working less for the interest of the impoverished populations and more for staying in power no matter how. Through characters and narrative situations, Lalami shows that illegal immigration is a trap. For even when the harrag makes it to the host country and starts sending remittances like Aziz to family back at home, Aziz remains a looser. The middle-class ideal of a steady income and improved living standards lifts the Maghrebian’s spontaneity and turns him or her into a superfluous commodity, seeking always to behave, not to think. Unlike Aziz or Larbi then, Murad failed to make it to Spain. His prolonged joblessness allows him eventually to reverse the biopolitical reality via embracing the art of ‘story telling’. Readers find him expertly selling artworks in souvenir shops inn Tangier. Success in this context is not capitalistically driven; it involves organic connecting of self-important American tourists with the artwork. The tourism industry becomes less of a recognition of already ordered reality and more of an encounter with a new one. Money matters but does not determine or control the encounter. The self-reflexive Murad assumes now a constructive engagement with the world.
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Lulu Publishing, Raleigh, NC, USA (2012)
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Tradition and modernity have been most of the time treated in scholarly debates as two diametrically-opposed apparatus of African identity. This study illustrates that contrary to this widely disseminated belief, tradition and modernity... more
Tradition and modernity have been most of the time treated in scholarly debates as two diametrically-opposed apparatus of African identity. This study illustrates that contrary to this widely disseminated belief, tradition and modernity are two cronies that are simultaneously counterproductive and coercive for African communities. For, when closely examined, tradition and modernity cannot foster any viable notion of self and identity. Through our discussion of the role of tradition and the interplay of negative tradition within deplete cultures, it becomes fairly evident that the poor performance of African communities in matters related to development can be answerable when shedding light on the social context resultant from the contaminated interconnection between European modernity and African archaic traditions. The colonial legacy, the context within which European modernity and African traditions met, according to this study, should not be overlooked for any forward-looking perspective.
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Ayi Kwei Armah is a living Ghanaian novelist and cultural activist. His life and body of novelistic experiments show a meticulous preoccupation with Africa's present cultural crisis. His seven novels to date, in addition to... more
Ayi Kwei Armah is a living Ghanaian novelist and cultural activist. His life and body of novelistic experiments show a meticulous preoccupation with Africa's present cultural crisis. His seven novels to date, in addition to his autobiography entitled The Eloquence of the ...
This paper argues that in the seven novels of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, beauty is approached as a trope, and that the absence of beauty denotes the postcolonial condition whose moral code translates horrid social relations,... more
This paper argues that in the seven novels of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, beauty is approached as a trope, and that the absence of beauty denotes the postcolonial condition whose moral code translates horrid social relations, corrupt politics and massive failure. Thus, the beauty of the African locale should function as an incentive to alter the ugliness of the present, and advance the cultural renaissance that Armah envisages for Africa. As such beauty operates as an aesthetic incentive wherein inspiration from the natural locale is transmuted into university curricula, revamping authentic African values for the pressing need of development changes.
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Ayi Kwei Armah (1939-) is a Ghanaian novelist who has written so far seven novels, famous among which are his irst The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Two Thousand Seasons (1973) comes fourth in order of appearance, but it is the... more
Ayi Kwei Armah (1939-) is a Ghanaian novelist who has written so far seven novels, famous among which are his irst The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Two Thousand Seasons (1973) comes fourth in order of appearance, but it is the irst where Armah plunges into Africa's millennial past. The Healers (1979), Osiris Rising (1995) and KMT in the House of Life (2002) all span a given period related to African history, the last two even go as far as Ancient Egypt with its heliographic scripts, but Two Thousand Season in a number of respects remains an unparalleled book in Armah's oeuvre. This article answers what it means to write a historical novel while the initial intention is to evoke the frustrations of an unhappy present. Armah has started his novelistic career with a book – The Beautyful Ones – that carefully examines the postcolonial reality in his home country. In order to bypass the unhappy state of affair of the present, Armah sought to undo the damaging effects of master-narratives through a mythical construction of Africa's millennial existence. For him, what caused pitfalls from political independences – as evocatively dramatized in The Beautyful Ones; Fragments; Why Are So Blest? – is Africans' trust and sometimes belief in the stories made and circulated by essentially non-Africans. In other words, the reductive clichés, and generalized stereotypes have furnished the imperial powers with the necessary verbal tools in terms of a 'discourse' whereby these powers have been able to carry on and perpetuate its control and manipulation. In this connection, Armah's Two Thousand Seasons can be read as a text wrestling against other texts in the battle of representing Africa. The present study, thus, details on which texts Two Thousand Seasons draws upon, in what way and towards which end?
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues in her 2009 collection of short stories that in as much as brutal dictatorship together with extreme underdevelopment propel young Nigerians for immigration, inaccurate and often scandalizing media... more
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues in her 2009 collection of short stories that in as much as brutal dictatorship together with extreme underdevelopment propel young Nigerians for immigration, inaccurate and often scandalizing media portrayal also has nonetheless an important share in the sad drama. Her drama proposes way of circumventing cultural reification caused by inaccurate media representation.
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Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, and 14 morePostcolonial Literature, Decolonization (African History), Alienation, Third World, Decolonial Thought, Anticolonial Theory, Alienation in Literature, Anticolonialism, Postcolonial and Anticolonial Studies, Third world Marxisms/Tricontinental Marxisms (Mao, Nationalism and Decolonization, Postcolonialism, Societal Change In Health and Social Care, and Algerian anticolonialism
Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Capitalism, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Intellectual History of Capitalism, Democratic Republic of Congo, and 8 moreDecolonial Thought, Decolonization, Colonial and Postcolonial History of Congo, Belgian Congo, Labour Theory of Value, Republic of Congo, Spatial Strategies of Capitalism, and Postcolonialism
Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Democratization, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Maghreb studies, Authoritarianism, and 12 moreAuthoritarian regimes, Comparative Politics, Democratization, Authoritarian Regimes, Regime Change, Concept Analysis, Measurement, Algeria, Decolonization, French colonial Algeria, Postcoloniality and decolonization, Contemporary Algeria, Algerian history, Postcolonial Criticism in the Third World Literature, Littérature Maghrébine, Nationalism and Decolonization, and Postcolonialism
Not only did the Haitian Revolution of 1791 not happen spontaneously as much of the existing historiography wants us to believe, but John Garrigus 'A Secret among the Blacks specifies that social explosion had been simmering under the... more
Not only did the Haitian Revolution of 1791 not happen spontaneously as much of the existing historiography wants us to believe, but John Garrigus 'A Secret among the Blacks specifies that social explosion had been simmering under the surface for almost a century if not more. Before inspiring freedom fighters elsewhere in the world, Parisian revolutionaries perhaps little expected that their statements could mobilize slaves against the class of French planters in a French colony: that of Saint Domingue.
Research Interests: Political Economy, Historiography of the French Revolution, History of Slavery, Haiti, Haitian Revolution, and 7 more18th & 19th Centuries, Precolonial African History, Political Economy and History, Slavery and Slave Resistance, Slave Culture and Resistance, Third world Marxisms/Tricontinental Marxisms (Mao, and Slavery and the Slave Trade
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Cedric Robinson's An Anthropology of Marxism was first published in 2001, but a second edition appeared in 2019 with a new preface from celebrity feminist scholar Avery F. Gordon and a new foreword by filmmaker and academic H. L. T. Quan.... more
Cedric Robinson's An Anthropology of Marxism was first published in 2001, but a second edition appeared in 2019 with a new preface from celebrity feminist scholar Avery F. Gordon and a new foreword by filmmaker and academic H. L. T. Quan. This new edition, which understandably pays tribute to the recently deceased author, disputes the idea that Karl Marx's oeuvre marks the advent of socialism. Rather, Robinson concluded that Marxism rather has its roots in socialism and that socialism has galvanized the oppressed-slaves, peasants, women, workers, the unemployedthroughout the ages against manifold oppressors. The book traces Marxism to the socialist drive of Christianity but argues that the socialist component is not culture specific. While reducing Marx's thinking to a discourse on economics indicates that Robinson underestimated Marx's subversive clarity, ultimately, for Robinson, only socialism, not Marxism, can provide a humanist tool for universal freedom.
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This collection of ten essays by historians, art historians and literary scholars hailing from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Poland endeavours to explain why many modern artists between 1860 and 1940 embraced... more
This collection of ten essays by historians, art historians and literary scholars hailing from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Poland endeavours to explain why many modern artists between 1860 and 1940 embraced anarchist politics. The editor, Carolin Kosuch, contributes a brief introduction, in which she tells us that the project began at a workshop at the German Historical Institute in Rome in 2016. The ten essays are divided into three sections: Frictions: Aesthetics or Politics; Fractions: Declining-Pioneering-Redeeming; and Focal Points: Art and Education in Local and Transnational Perspectives. I did not find these divisions particularly meaningful. Instead of including abstracts for each article, it would have been more helpful to include a brief theoretical discussion with each section. That might have clarified why some of the essays engage with modern art less than one would expect. The heavily French focus is understandable given the emphasis on modernism in the years when Paris dominated the art world, but given how popular anarchism was in Italy, Spain and Latin America, the book might have sought a broader geographic focus. Barcelona and Vienna were both sites of modernism, yet neither is mentioned. Within cities in which modernism thrived, artists tended to congregate in artists' colonies, yet there is little discussion of the bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village, Montmartre or Schwabing, despite the fact that anarchists and artists shared these heterotopias. Indeed, the index has an entry for 'beauty' but none for 'bohemia' (the index is not reliable). Several essays refer to the different interpretations of Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1968, and Peter Bürger's similarly titled book of 1974. Bürger equated modernism with aestheticism, regarding art as self-referential, while avant-garde artists wanted to de-institutionalise art and aspired to social change. Poggioli emphasised instead the drive for novelty and experimentation, and minimised the distinction between the two terms. Since artists who were anarchists sought parallel revolutions in art and society, most of the writers in this book favour Bürger, but none fully engage in a theoretical discussion of the modernist/
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Research Interests: French Revolution, French art, Social History of Art, United Arab Emirates, Egyptian Revolution, and 7 moreArab Spring (Arab Revolts), Tunisian Revolution-Arab Spring, Arab Uprisings, European Counter-Revolution, Arab Spring, Syrian uprising, Social History of Indian Art, Indigenous Knowledge Systmes, and Art In Period of Political Unrest (Especially the French Revolutions and the Paris Commune)
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An ear ly pho to of Zoulikha al-Chaib aka Yam i na Oudaï (1916-1958) Alger ian resis tance fight er, and the inspi ra tion for Assia Dje bar's 2002 nov el, La femme sans sépulture.
Research Interests: Colonialism, Algerian war, Algerian War (History), Anti-Capitalism, Settler colonialism, and 8 moreFrench colonial Algeria, French Colonial History, Insurrectionary Theory, Postcolonial Thought, Anticolonialism, Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Belonging and Citizenship, Nationalism and Decolonization, and Algerian anticolonialism
is a historian. Need to Know traces the rise of what ultimately has become known as the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most famous intelligence body among the eighteen spy institutions in the U.S.
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Can one emancipate with a structure that is largely nonemancipatory? And what is the exact role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the context of the massive insurrections known as the Arab Spring? Several observers note that with the Arab... more
Can one emancipate with a structure that is largely nonemancipatory? And what is the exact role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the context of the massive insurrections known as the Arab Spring? Several observers note that with the Arab Spring, the revolution has been present whereas the revolutionaries have been largely missing. 1 Others note that both the revolutionaries and the revolution have been active, but the reverse of the Brotherhood's fortunes indicates a cycle wherein the counterrevolution has gained the upper hand and that ascendency has not spared the Brotherhood, even when the latter has always
Research Interests: Islamic Political Thought, Social movements and revolution, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Movements and Political Islam, Islamic Social Sciences (esp. Political science), and 8 moreEgypt under Anvar Sadat's presidency, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muslim Brothers in Egypt after the revolution 2011, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Egyptian revolution 2011, Arab Uprisings, Islamic political thoughts in democratization process, Moslem brotherhood, Islam and human rights, political reform in Egypt, Antiglobalization Social Movements, Muslim Society, and Anti Capitalist Social Movements
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in this study, proposes reshaping American intelligence institutions to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. America boasts of exactly eighteen agencies, but instead of aspiring awe or efficacy, the number should underline the... more
in this study, proposes reshaping American intelligence institutions to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. America boasts of exactly eighteen agencies, but instead of aspiring awe or efficacy, the number should underline the limitations of the current structuring of intelligence bodies. Since each apparatus was added after a major failure, the lingering challenges remain unsurmountable, and the strategic advantage over adversaries is unmet. The challenge facing the intelligence community and America now lies less in half-hearted coordination work between diverse and specialised agencies and more in the fundamental contradiction between business and national interests. The two claims are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled. Unless some formula is found to harness business for the nation's benefit, the intelligence agencies' operations will stay largely dysfunctional and bypassed by tenacious adversaries.
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Under neoliberalism, Basu Thakur finds, postcolonial theory has become a race for victimhood, "a brand of culturalism…" (p. xxiii). Following Gayatri Spivak's specification that subalternity is a position and not an identity, Basu Thakur... more
Under neoliberalism, Basu Thakur finds, postcolonial theory has become a race for victimhood, "a brand of culturalism…" (p. xxiii). Following Gayatri Spivak's specification that subalternity is a position and not an identity, Basu Thakur argues that postcolonialism has drifted into conceiving subalternity as an identity in practice. That explains why it has become anti-emancipatory. Relying on insights from psychoanalysis, Basu Thakur finds that postcolonial writers have to conceive identity as an ontological lack to be truly empowering. Indeed, it does not behove contemporary Indians or Algerians to merely reinstate the Other, the colonial master, by some postcolonial acolytesdisguised-as-authors. This is so because the Other remains rooted in fantasy, functioning as a governing structure that lacks substance. This explains why the best policy for decolonised peoples is neither to disavow nor take the European worldview seriously. Instead of addressing the lack on which postcolonial subjectivity sits as a frightening void, the book encourages readers to view it as a call toward universalism, a step toward revoking both the coloniser and the colonised.
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Research Interests: Strategy (Military Science), French Studies, Naval History, Second World War, World War II, and 8 moreFrench Imperialism, French Imperialism in West Africa, United States Naval History, Revue Historique des Armées. Dernier numéro en ligne : 265 | 2011 Les étrangers dans l'armée française après 1870, French Military Thought, French Military History, United States Imperialism, and French Army - land-based nuclear forces (Le 1st groupement de missiles strategigues (1st GMS)
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Research Interests: Globalization, History of Slavery, Ghana, Credit Default Swaps, Middle Passage, Atlantic World Slavery, African Diaspora, Slavery and Medicine, Black Women's History, Violence Studies, Caribbean History, and 4 moreMiddle passage and Black Atlantic Studies, Spatial Strategies of Capitalism, The Impact of Globalization in Africa, and Ancient Long Distance Trade
Research Interests: Revolutions, Anarchism, Anarchist Studies, History of Anarchism, Contested Spaces (Anthropology of space), and 8 moreSocial movements and revolution, Contestation and political processes, Authoritarianism, Post-Anarchism, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Tunisian Revolution-Arab Spring, Anticapitalism, and Anti-Authoritarianism
Africa prompts you to ask what the MENA countries want from their rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, or precisely what the Arab states want from their relations with Russia. Once you have that answered, one can start... more
Africa prompts you to ask what the MENA countries want from their rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, or precisely what the Arab states want from their relations with Russia. Once you have that answered, one can start registering whether Putin's policy is indeed on the rise and if that rise is concrete or rather chimerical. Popularly contested and chased by successive U.S. administrations to improve their meager human rights records, beleaguered Arab establishments reach for Russia less to balance their relations and more to break their isolation via finding a patron that does not chastise them over democracy and human rights. Putin understands this Arab anxiety and spoils his reputation by rolling out the red carpet for the likes of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). In doing so, Putin is neither naïve nor fooled by his counterparts' mimic displays of admiration and awe. 4/26/22, 11:37 PM Russia Rising? The Soaring that Precipitates a Free Fall https://intpolicydigest.org/russia-rising-the-soaring-that-precipitates-a-free-fall/ 2/7 As the editors of Russia Rising elaborate and will be unfolded below, Putin knows the exact stakes from his adventure in Syria, the risks from courtships with the Gulf monarchies, or the burden of the camaraderie with Egyptian and other North African partners, but he goes along with these strongmen, corroborating his momentary objectives at the expense of longterm interests. Such objectives, in his assessment, are worth the trouble. Like all stories, the one regarding Russia's reach for warm waters is never new. During the Cold War and a few days into the fourth Arab-Israeli war in 1973, or the Yom Kippur War, the editors recall how Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had to wake up Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev twice at night, literally begging for boots on the ground: "Save me," Sadat cried over the phone. Brezhnev's adamant rejection went down in history as an exasperation less with an ally and more with a disgruntled adolescent, recklessly calling for World War Three. Irrespective of how Egyptians today read that war as a great victory or otherwise, Brezhnev's veto against sending Soviet troops to fight for the Egyptians had convinced Sadat to switch sides to the Americans through his policy known as infitah, the Arabic word for opening.
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Research Interests: Maghreb studies, Mediterranean and North Africa, Algerian Literature, Contemporary Algerian art and culture, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and 5 moreLA LITTÉRATURE ET LE THÉÂTRE ALGERIEN, Algerian Literature In French, Littérature Maghrébine, La Littérature Féminine Maghrébine, and Les années 90 dans la littérature algérienne
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Black Liberation Theology, Black Power, Black Intellectual History, Afrofuturism, and 8 moreOctavia Butler, Black Nationalism; Black Religious Thought, Sun Ra (Musician), Janelle Monáe, Queerness, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Black Women's Activism, and Afrofuturism and Science Fiction
Class used to be swept under the carpet, but not anymore in this volume. A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa prides its credentials on reversing the trend put in place by RST. Given the neoliberal domineering... more
Class used to be swept under the carpet, but not anymore in this volume. A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa prides its credentials on reversing the trend put in place by RST. Given the neoliberal domineering order, marshaling the courage to discuss class is certainly an added value. Nevertheless, what is troublesome is the rejection of causality in this volume. The editors follow Louis Althusser’s structuralist approach where “…causes are simultaneous effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestations. (p. 1) The flattening of causes by equating them with effects and presupposing both as free-roaming enunciations explain the revival of classless for tracing classes’ role in deciding the destinies for emancipation and more towards stultifying the dynamics of social change.
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Speaking of the number of ordeals and given the reformist agenda of the Brotherhood or, more precisely, its lust for power, it is unlikely that the Brotherhood will cease playing with fire from which it bitterly tasted four times so far.... more
Speaking of the number of ordeals and given the reformist agenda of the Brotherhood or, more precisely, its lust for power, it is unlikely that the Brotherhood will cease playing with fire from which it bitterly tasted four times so far. Other ordeals will follow suit because, at the moment of composing these lines, reliable news reports circulate that the Brotherhood has been repeatedly involved in direct talks with representatives of General Sissi's government, the very person who caused the Brotherhood's demise. The fact that the Brotherhood is even willing to sit and consider proposals by Sissi's representatives is evidence of its political naivety. Many will rebut that aspiration to play a role in the future of their country. The number of ordeals, and the vocabulary itself, as the word mihnā or ordeal in Arabic stipulates a momentary but also necessary hardship from which a positive situation will eventually follow, expresses a willingness to impersonate the naïveté of an idiot and cancel ordinary Egyptians' historical destiny.
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Research Interests: Slavery, History of Slavery, Abolition of Slavery, Anti-slavery, Caribbean Slavery, and 5 moreImperialism, Middle Passage, Atlantic World Slavery, African Diaspora, Slavery and Medicine, Black Women's History, Violence Studies, Caribbean History, Sugarcane, Sea Power, and Middle passage and Black Atlantic Studies
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Research Interests: Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Psychology, and 11 moreSubaltern, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Social and Cultural History, Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Theory/Subaltern Studies, Estudios Subalternos, Revolution, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, Revolutionaries, and Postcolonialism
Research Interests: French colonialism, 'Decolonization' and the politics of settler state/Indigenous relations, Algerian War (History), History of Colonial India, Settler Colonial Studies, and 8 moreSettler Colonialism & Its Legacies, Algeria, French colonial Algeria, French Colonial History, Vineyard, Contemporary Algeria, Colonialism and Imperialism, and Cash Crops
Research Interests: Political Violence and Terrorism, International Political Economy, Revolutionary Theory, the History and Theory of Liberal Arts Education, Arts and Humanities, and 4 morePolitical Economy and History, Political Violence and Terrorism International Security, International Relations, Color Revolution, and Syria Civil War
Research Interests: African Studies, African History, African Literature, African American Literature, Abolition of Slavery, and 9 morePan Africanism, Critique of Political Economy, Liberia, Pan-Africanism, Poltical Economy, Extreme Value Theory, Pan African Studies, African Chattel Enslavement, and Pan Africanism and Regional Integration
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Erin Louis' latest book Expose Yourself: How to Take Risks, Question Everything, and Find Yourself claims the facilitation of youth empowerment by encouraging a confrontational stance vis-à-vis society and its pillars. In targeting the... more
Erin Louis' latest book Expose Yourself: How to Take Risks, Question Everything, and Find Yourself claims the facilitation of youth empowerment by encouraging a confrontational stance vis-à-vis society and its pillars. In targeting the past (religion), it
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For Ali Eteraz, contemporary Muslim subjectivity is imprisoned inside centuries of indoctrinations. The dramas in Native Believer (2016) and Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (2014) resonate along the lines of a new ontology for Muslims. Through... more
For Ali Eteraz, contemporary Muslim subjectivity is imprisoned inside centuries of indoctrinations. The dramas in Native Believer (2016) and Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (2014) resonate along the lines of a new ontology for Muslims. Through his narratives, Eteraz sets himself as the Spinoza of the Muslim world. His protagonist in Native Believer remains unable to reconcile his Muslim background with his Americanness until he embraces the androgynous third identity that mitigates between the former two. He eventually joins a US Department of State team that reaches vulnerable Muslims worldwide. Instead of furthering the expansionist goals of the empire, Eteraz fashions his protagonists as people keen on aiding fellow Muslims to become active participants in US society and the world at large.
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The present paper argues that Mohja Kahf's thematic preoccupations in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) cannot be exclusive to the ways in which young Arab and Muslim children outside the United States first experience Islam and... more
The present paper argues that Mohja Kahf's thematic preoccupations in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) cannot be exclusive to the ways in which young Arab and Muslim children outside the United States first experience Islam and their Muslim identity. Ever since its publication, the novel is often cited in reference to United States Muslims and how such Muslims approach their identity both as Muslims and Americans simultaneously. True, the setting of the story is Indiana of the 1970s and 1980s, but the way Khadra Shamey has been raised can be reminiscent of the manners in which most Arab and Muslim youth are raised in today's Muslim world (not only in the U.S.). Extreme forms of puritanical upbringing like the one observed by Khadra's parents and Dawah Center community can be qualified as paranoid, hyper-protective and counter-productive. Initially driven by the myth of a return to authentic Islam, that is the one supposedly practiced at the heyday of Muslim civilization centuries ago, as the drama of the examined novel carefully observes a decent into this mythical identity, and the present paper emphasizes that such a mythical wish-drive for a 'deodorized' past cannot be limited to Muslims in the U.S. only. Contemporary Arab and Muslim cultures show varied propulsions in line with Muslim missionaries' culture of Indianapolis berated by Khadra: anxiety-driven, disturbingly over-conscious of its identity as an oppositional ontological entity. The net result from such a mythical return-wish is a multilayered crisis which fundamentally hampers constructive understanding of self and other. Interestingly, Mohja Kahf's procures a visionary outlook away from the problem. With Khadra's divorce and subsequent brief journey to Syria—her parents' homeland—the twenty-one year old young woman is able to draw her own distance and review her parents' stance from Islam, see their limitations and come with her own non-mythical and practically modern synthesis and stance of Islam. Khadra's sharp observations and tacit inculcations of her own guilt-free approach of Islam can be fostered as a guiding principle for cultural reformers and curricula designers in the Muslim world today. In a predominantly defeatist and cynical culture that unfolds alarming levels of hatred–all traced to either Islamic Brotherhood or Wahabism together with the predicament of the national project—Khadra's understanding of Islam can trigger a progressive transformation away from that ultra-devout and mythically-driven approach.
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It is like a dog inside my head: it barks, and I write. Except it's not so simple. It seems to me that I'm the one at the end of the leash; it walks me, sometimes for half an hour per day, lets me prance through its universe and then... more
It is like a dog inside my head: it barks, and I write. Except it's not so simple. It seems to me that I'm the one at the end of the leash; it walks me, sometimes for half an hour per day, lets me prance through its universe and then leads me toward my blind spot-my everyday life. Let me explain: it's a giant dog made up of stars in a dark night that wraps him in its boundless skin. He barks out letters, I write. Sometimes I write well, sometimes not, when he goes too fast and I can only catch partial sentences. He's big, this black dog who jumps over me to go and drink water on the other side of the world and then come back. That's how I describe things that happen in my head. Because to those who see me from the outside, nothing is happening. I'm bent over an enormous notebook filled with things that are crossed out, in front of a microphone, tapping at a keyboard, and I write endlessly, all the time. A scribe at a newspaper, paid to pretend to have courage. But no one knows that I cross things out incessantly between columns. It's kind of on purpose, my way of writing through my scritch-scratch. In fact, it's a pathway between my letters and the vast, cosmic barking of the dog holding me on a leash that hangs from the end of the paw, like a constellation above the miniature world. So my inspiration comes from a divine animal-he could even have been one of the twelve zodiac signs, if such a thing happened inside several heads turned toward the sky, and not just mine, which is too small for all that. What do I write? What I can't write in any other way: madness. Good madness, the one that holds the keys to an immense door leading to the sky, or into a library where the mass of all possible things is described: the colors, meanings, future and purpose, arranged on the shelves with a Holy Book that constitutes the absolute instruction manual. That's how it is. I like the dog and I know he'll murmur in my ear when I fall short in explaining the universe… The dog is my inspiration. Often I sense the great texts that arrive in my head first as melodies. Music, I swear, or the notes of the piano. It's sound before ink and notebook. I don't even know what I am going to write. I just know that somewhere it's all in order, already in a head that's more expansive than mine. Then, I begin to write, and the images arrive first. They make me laugh! They always have this way of giving me an angle, and adding a pheasant's tail to the ends of sentences that others have worn out… Kamel Daoud, 2012 After a carefully reading the text, answer the following questions below: 1-The reference to the dog and its incessant barking in the writer's head is: a-literal b-figurative c-delusional d-pathological 2-Who walks who in the third sentence? a-the writer walks the dogs to give it the pleasure it needs after a long day between four walls b-the writer's dog walks the writer's teenage girl as the writer is constantly busy to walk her himself
Research Interests: Creative Writing, Critical Pedagogy, Literary Criticism, Community Leadership - Critical Online Pedagogy, Urban Education, Critical Theory/Pedagogy, Critical Literacies, Youth Culture, Hip Hop Culture, Curriculum & Development, and 2 moreExamination and evaluation system of primary education and Example
of this couple, Guernica of femininity, crucified. The man holds her in his arms, his face buried in her stomach, gaze distant. As though he wished to give her his life, find her womb, turn back time with his bare hands, to childhood so... more
of this couple, Guernica of femininity, crucified. The man holds her in his arms, his face buried in her stomach, gaze distant. As though he wished to give her his life, find her womb, turn back time with his bare hands, to childhood so that she comes back to life, so that he can be pardoned for not protecting her. She is standing up, carried more by wings than legs. There's blood on her face, already turned toward her wound, which surprises her like an unknown galaxy. You feel her life has become so poignant that she will die of it. The moment in the photo is eternal, and paradoxically it will immortalize her death. The brief apparition of a god. In the background there are passersby, a friend, some people, you, me, others so far away, all of creation, the history of this country and of all countries. The couple falls but stays frozen, united, stuck together, he crying for her, for the mother, the sister, the woman, the daughter, the womb, her destroyed maternity, a woman being ripped away from him by having her own skin torn out. He refuses, tries again, cries out the most immense "no" possible; his eyes give you pain, make you want to cry and beg the gods who are passing by. The man is cleaved apart, tearful, lost to time, fighting with his muscles against the obvious. She has already become a martyr, with that gaze they have when they're looking at something immense, desired, mortal, capable of giving eternal life with a simple brush against it. Shaimaa murdered in the back. Living forever in this captured instant, offered up, held back, shut away and open to all. Then time arrives. It dissolves the couple into a thousand pieces: the woman slumps, then rises up. The man tries to catch her because he knows death is a deep well where the water gives no reflection. He lifts her, along with the world and its trees, skies, friends, children, and stars, and carries her. But already she's no longer there where he's fighting hurriedly. In the third photo they are separated, her body has already lost its name, gone out, forgotten. The woman returns to the immensity. Time restarts, flows, people shout, run; and then comes history. Back to the first photo. The one of the embrace. Where you see the woman in profile. The gaze of a woman wounded in the back, an expression of betrayal. And the man who holds her as though begging her, shouting, asking forgiveness. Haunting. A naked moment in our history. Murdered revolutions. Plundered springs. Dictatorships that fall and rise again. Shaimaa falls, and doesn't rise again. Not yet. A devastating image. Mona Lisa of this couple, Guernica of our revolutions. My respect for you, Shaimaa. Because I don't have your courage, I won't have your death. Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns * On January 25, 2015, the Egyptian activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh was killed by a bullet while celebrating the fourth anniversary of the revolution with other demonstrators in Tahrir Square. The photos of her death were seen around the world.
Here I refer to one way of carrying on research successfully. Towards a smooth, that is, less anxious and more engaging research experience, you may want to explore this teaching document. As it is not enough to take notes and store them... more
Here I refer to one way of carrying on research successfully. Towards a smooth, that is, less anxious and more engaging research experience, you may want to explore this teaching document. As it is not enough to take notes and store them in one annotated bibliographical system or another, since the notes are not going out of themselves to emerge and start the drafting work, it becomes necessary to outline, that is, plan for the organization of the writing materials you are engaged in. Therefore, in this document you will repeatedly meet words such as outline, outlining, and re-outlining. Please help enrich.
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How does it feel when you realize that on impulse your father or mother holds a muted distaste for you but without entirely disowning you-all because your skin has suddenly ceased to be white? They know that your bloodline is theirs, but... more
How does it feel when you realize that on impulse your father or mother holds a muted distaste for you but without entirely disowning you-all because your skin has suddenly ceased to be white? They know that your bloodline is theirs, but still, they do not take you in, as they always did, that is, as unconditionally theirs. They no longer
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This is a draft of a book review
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Name Group A YOUNG SYRIAN, ALONE AT NIGHT BENEATH TEN THOUSAND COMMENTS Horror is something unknowable that each person carries alone in his own nighttime. On a screen you can listen and watch, but you can't know; you find yourself... more
Name Group A YOUNG SYRIAN, ALONE AT NIGHT BENEATH TEN THOUSAND COMMENTS Horror is something unknowable that each person carries alone in his own nighttime. On a screen you can listen and watch, but you can't know; you find yourself blocked, suddenly, at the threshold of absolute compassion. When a young Syrian is arrested by the butcher of Damascus's army, for us he's a number, a few brief seconds in a clip on a phone, an image. Then the speaker comments, you see the rest of the world looking for a solution, or a pretend solution, and after that we don't know anything more. What does the word "torture" mean? How can you convey to each viewer the precise sensation of the screech of an arrested child who's been tortured, his elbows broken, eyes punctured, honor violated, drawing his last breath, utterly alone in pain, and for whom the promised nation will be nothing more than his tomb, and freedom a draft of air? How can you explain the absolute horror of this tortured Syrian, the blinding pain, whose martyrdom only has meaning for the survivors, a stain on all humanity? One single person tortured, killed, in this Arab world is enough for all the dictators to deserve to fall, be thrown out, condemned, and hanged. What's happening in Syria is horrible, nearly inexplicable by politics. You can soliloquize about geopolitical strategy, conspiracy, whatever. It doesn't take anything away from the raw truth: death, torture, abuse, rape, theft, bombs. To speak of other things is indecent. It's a crime against one's own humanity, and complicity. The butcher of Damascus is a criminal and the Syrians in revolt are an example of the greatest courage against repression, embargo, collective punishment, mass graves, and governance by terror. This regime is ready to do the worst, and they are doing it: international terrorism, kidnappings, falsified confessions, betrayals, and taking an entire land and region hostage. Everything is fair game to keep the revolt and the international community at bay. What for? To stay put. But what land, if you destroy it? We don't know. This regime has been dead for months, it can't be engaged with, it is alone, criminal, condemned, without sense, and yet it remains in place, with a gun pointed at the head of its people, threatening to explode everything if anyone gets too close. Firm in its belief that a people can be subdued with force and death. And the image stays in one's mind: this young man, grabbed by the neck, loaded into a truck with soldiers, crumpled into a ball with his hands on his head. We'll never see him again. We'll know nothing of his death, or his cries of pain when they break his elbows and jaw. He'll disappear under a slew of comments, analysis, doubts, debates, and polemics. Everyone talks, myself included, while he is alone hearing nothing but his own breath. Of all the people who've risen up against the Forty Thieves, the Syrian people are a beacon of admiration. Their courage is exemplary, and their future belongs to them because they've paid the price of it so dearly that they can attain it only in heaven. The Syrian regime has become hysterical, a danger to the entire region, incredulous, a modern case of the terror regimes of the twentieth century-totalitarian, duplicitous, pathological, and cunning. Assad, Makhlouf & Co. versus humanity. This is the end of the column, but the image stays: this young man, the day before yesterday, put into the truck of a family army, shoved from the back into a tomb, head down, unnamed, collapsing under blows and ten thousand analyses, alone in his terror, and yet still illuminated from inside by the meaning he gave to his life, and to his death.
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It is like a dog inside my head: it barks, and I write. Except it's not so simple. It seems to me that I'm the one at the end of the leash; it walks me, sometimes for half an hour per day, lets me prance through its universe and then... more
It is like a dog inside my head: it barks, and I write. Except it's not so simple. It seems to me that I'm the one at the end of the leash; it walks me, sometimes for half an hour per day, lets me prance through its universe and then leads me toward my blind spot-my everyday life. Let me explain: it's a giant dog made up of stars in a dark night that wraps him in its boundless skin. He barks out letters, I write. Sometimes I write well, sometimes not, when he goes too fast and I can only catch partial sentences. He's big, this black dog who jumps over me to go and drink water on the other side of the world and then come back. That's how I describe things that happen in my head. Because to those who see me from the outside, nothing is happening. I'm bent over an enormous notebook filled with things that are crossed out, in front of a microphone, tapping at a keyboard, and I write endlessly, all the time. A scribe at a newspaper, paid to pretend to have courage. But no one knows that I cross things out incessantly between columns. It's kind of on purpose, my way of writing through my scritch-scratch. In fact, it's a pathway between my letters and the vast, cosmic barking of the dog holding me on a leash that hangs from the end of the paw, like a constellation above the miniature world. So my inspiration comes from a divine animal-he could even have been one of the twelve zodiac signs, if such a thing happened inside several heads turned toward the sky, and not just mine, which is too small for all that. What do I write? What I can't write in any other way: madness. Good madness, the one that holds the keys to an immense door leading to the sky, or into a library where the mass of all possible things is described: the colors, meanings, future and purpose, arranged on the shelves with a Holy Book that constitutes the absolute instruction manual. That's how it is. I like the dog and I know he'll murmur in my ear when I fall short in explaining the universe… The dog is my inspiration. Often I sense the great texts that arrive in my head first as melodies. Music, I swear, or the notes of the piano. It's sound before ink and notebook. I don't even know what I am going to write. I just know that somewhere it's all in order, already in a head that's more expansive than mine. Then, I begin to write, and the images arrive first. They make me laugh! They always have this way of giving me an angle, and adding a pheasant's tail to the ends of sentences that others have worn out… Kamel Daoud, 2012 After a carefully reading the text, answer the following questions below: 1. The reference to the dog and its incessant barking in the writer's head is: a. literal b-figurative c-delusional d-pathological 2. Who walks who in the third sentence? a. the writer walks the dogs to give it the pleasure it needs after a long day between four walls
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The Arab world is culturally stumbling. The current conflict in Syria is but one testimony on how the misuse of memory contributes to this stumbling. Other instances include autocratic governments such as Algeria’s, who in response to... more
The Arab world is culturally stumbling. The current conflict in Syria is but one testimony on how the misuse of memory contributes to this stumbling. Other instances include autocratic governments such as Algeria’s, who in response to perceived threats from the Arab Spring bribed the population in order to quell aspirations for democratic and civil society, as the second epilogue above evokes. In its ideal presupposition of the world, Islamism gives birth to what Fethi Benslama calls ‘le surmusulman’: the one who overbids in his imaginary defense for the faith, nursing a pathological variety of Muslimhood characterized by its regressive approach to time. Le surmusulman cancels life and idealizes death for the sake of redressing a certain ‘injured Muslim ideality’ (2014, 2016). In the proposed project, I study this sick approach to time by underscoring how the pathology is not new or contingent with terrorism, as Benslama claims. In line with what Fatima Mernissi highlights in the first epilogue above, Muslims’ mythical timeframe is as old as the practice of the faith has been. I instead focus on how three contemporary Arab women writers attempt to outsmart this sick infatuation with the presupposed Muslim glory and golden age.
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Borrowing the concepts of 'pornotroping' and 'vestibular' from African-American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalising demotions and... more
Borrowing the concepts of 'pornotroping' and 'vestibular' from African-American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalising demotions and misogynistic practices. In registering their objectification as 'flesh-only,' that is through mapping the vestibular, these female characters have converged orientalism and misogyny and charted their own liberating subjectivity. The liberation specifies how orthodox Muslim jurisprudence is predicated on violence against femininity. Still, 'Pornotroping' cannot function without its dialectical opposite, the vestibular. The latter elicits the amount of demystification carried on by North African gender activists in the manner of mudawana. …traditionalism cannot help modernise society, even if it can revolutionise it, while historicism can.
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On pseudo radicals and false radicalism in the context of the euphemism otherwise known as the Arab Spring
Research Interests: Revolutions, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism, Communism, Social movements and revolution, Radicalism, and 5 moreEgypt, Arab Spring, middle east, Arab studies, The Cultural Geography of Social Media, Ritual and Communication in the Arab Spring, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Tunisian Revolution-Arab Spring, and Anticapitalism
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Camus, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born and raised in colonial Algeria. He is largely considered in independent Algeria as the spokesperson of white settlers, perhaps even the pride of a social class better known as les pieds... more
Camus, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born and raised in colonial Algeria. He is largely considered in independent Algeria as the spokesperson of white settlers, perhaps even the pride of a social class better known as les pieds noirs, descendants of white settlers or colonists who settled after the conquest of Algeria in 1830. They acquired the fertile land at a fraction of the cost following the decimation of Arab tribes and the ruinous policies that led to the dispossession of the remaining inhabitants from their communal lands. The early colonists are branded as pioneers. They worked the land and rendered it extremely productive. During the 1930s, the colonists entertained that if America is proud of California, then France is proud of Orléansville, now Chlef Province. True, these colonists were industrious but notoriously known for exploiting dispossessed Algerians. Russian convicts, who lived through the reign of the last Tsar and were serving prison terms in Bône, were shocked to find that the colonists treated Algerians worse than sheep. With the end of military rule in the 1880s, colonists were responsible-through exclusionary practices-for literally sending Algerians behind the sun. Understandably, by the time the Algerian Revolution
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164 ayi kwei armah’s intellectuals of the african renaissance Ayi Kwei Armah is a living Ghanaian novelist and cultural activist. His life and body of novelistic experiments show a meticulous preoccupation with Africa’s present cultural... more
164 ayi kwei armah’s intellectuals of the african renaissance Ayi Kwei Armah is a living Ghanaian novelist and cultural activist. His life and body of novelistic experiments show a meticulous preoccupation with Africa’s present cultural crisis. His seven novels to date, in addition to his autobiography entitled The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006), all illustrate a relentless intellectual campaign for articulating the ways in which the ”right ” and committed intellectuals can be singled out from what he takes as multitudes of pseudo- or parvenu academics. For Armah, a carefully devised and administered educational system should form the basis for a reformed African ethos. This article explores Armah’s call for renovating the present educational philosophy that aims to promote a new idea of Africa. Constructing an authentic educational system is justified by him through the need to supersede the devastating effects imposed by and instituted through colonial education. Below is an atte...
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This paper argues that in the seven novels of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, beauty is approached as a trope, and that the absence of beauty denotes the postcolonial condition whose moral code translates horrid social relations,... more
This paper argues that in the seven novels of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, beauty is approached as a trope, and that the absence of beauty denotes the postcolonial condition whose moral code translates horrid social relations, corrupt politics and massive failure. Thus, the beauty of the African locale should function as an incentive to alter the ugliness of the present, and advance the cultural renaissance that Armah envisages for Africa. As such beauty operates as an aesthetic incentive wherein inspiration from the natural locale is transmuted into university curricula, revamping authentic African values for the pressing need of development changes.
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This is a blog summary of an extended research essay already published almost a year ago. please check: 10.1080/13688790.2020.1809070
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In studying Francophone Algerian Literature of the 1990s, a period otherwise known as the Black Decade or la décennie noire, Ford finds out that the literary outputs, instead of clarifying the conflict, reify it. Indeed, literary outputs... more
In studying Francophone Algerian Literature of the 1990s, a period otherwise known as the Black Decade or la décennie noire, Ford finds out that the literary outputs, instead of clarifying the conflict, reify it. Indeed, literary outputs published by celebrity figures both during the 1990s and after not only stay neutral about the ideological struggle between the secular-and-military status quo on the one hand and their Islamist contestants on the other, but deem it their mission to testify for posterity. That war was tagged as cultural and simplified to the point of pitting progressivists against depressives. Such a binary portrayal gained currency during the post-Cold War context where ideas of the clash of civilizations become the modo Operandi. Generations of Algerian authors, Ford specifies, have uncritically fallen to that categorization less because they were complicit with the state’s narrative but more due to channels of reception in France. Often, those channels recourse to timeless portrayals that reactivated the spectacle (never the essence) of Algeria’s war of independence: Algerian enlightened democrats as Les pieds noirs against bearded medievalists, reactivating FLN (National Liberation Front) recidivists. Only from February 2019 onward, the literary scene starts to disentangle this framing, counting some writers who dare to explore the black decade with less bias and a satisfying complexity.